Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Review

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 

Directed by Edgar Wright. Cast: Michael Cera, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman

After the disappointing box office on its release (Only $11 million in the first week in the US) “Scott Pilgrim…” is coming out on DVD and BluRay , hoping to find an audience and become of one those cult in the years to come, without being confused by the similarly themed “Kick-Ass” or sidelined by the massive “Inception”, in fact according to Wikipedia it became the top-selling Blu-ray on Amazon.com during the first day it was available.

To be honest I was one of the few who wasn’t quite taken by it, even when it first came out. I thought it was witty, original, fast, inventive and on the whole quite fun for the first 40 minutes. However after a while it begins to feel a bit stretched. 2 hours are definitely too much for what’s essentially an excuse to see people fighting as if they were on a video game. Even the eye-popping visual effects, however flashy (including the use of funny captions on the screen that make it all look like a comic) out-stayed their welcome and the novelty wears a bit thin.

The movie is based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and manages to capture their mood and quirkiness quite closely, however, as we all know what works on paper doesn’t necessarily work on film. What starts off as a touching and imaginative depiction of the romantic travails of a twenty-something kid, pretty quickly becomes a rather indulgent affair and starts to feel very long.

The story (if we can call it that way) is about Scott Pilgrim, a bass guitarist, who is in love with the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers, but in order to win her heart he has to defeat her “seven evil exes”. Yes, seven of them!! That was the number in the original comic version, I must confess that but after watching the film for about 1 I remember thinking to myself “Oh God, Scott has only beaten the 2 of them!”.

The makers try their best to give a different feel to each of the fight sequences and cram the film with enough appearances from more or less famous actors, but for me that wasn’t enough and by the time I got to the very last fight I just couldn’t wait for it to finish.

It is obviously aimed at the so-called wired generation and people who grew up on Nintendo and PS stations (as opposed to people like me who grew up with Intellevision and Atari consoles), but considering the short attention span of that target audience, it get the feeling that it might be a bit tiresome even for them.

I wouldn’t trash it completely. There are some inspired moments (the Universal logo at the front is one of them), Kieran Culkin’s turn as the gay flatmate is excellent (and makes you wish there was more of him) and the special effects are all top class, most of the pop culture and video games reference are quite clever, it’s just a shame that its irreverent tone loses its edge by being som faithful to the original story. I think the film would have gained something by getting rid off a couple of the “exes”

6.5/10